Nuclear watchdog agency accused of 'Jekyll and Hyde' job

April 2, 2014

Updated 9:40 a.m.

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One of two 640-ton steam generators, 65 feet long, is loaded on a barge in 2012 at the Port of Los Angeles. The new generators experienced serious internal wear that led to the accidental release of radioactive steam. H. LORREN AU JR.,, H. LORREN AU JR., THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Even though the nuclear reactors at San Onofre generating station are no longer operating the plant remains a warehouse for nearly 4,000 highly radioactive spent fuel rods. Register file photo

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San Onofre had two near-misses in 2012, when the mysterious tube wear in its new steam generators led to the release of radioactive gas, culminating in its shutdown. H. LORREN AU JR., PHOTOS: H. LORREN AU JR., STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The first meeting of San Onofre's Community Engagement Panel, which will advise owner Southern California Edison on decommissioning the shuttered nuclear reactors, will be from 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the San Clemente Community Center, 100 N. Calle Seville.

The meeting will include an overview of plans to dismantle the plant over the next 15 to 20 years, and a public comment period. One of the "guiding principles" of the panel is to move spent nuclear fuel, currently cooling in pools, into dry cask storage as quickly as possible, SCE said.

The chairman of the 18-member panel – recruited by SCE – is David Victor, a University of California, San Diego professor and expert on energy markets.

A community panel is not required by regulators as part of the decommissioning process, but it's a smart move, said David Lochbaum of the Union for Concerned Scientists, an NRC watchdog.

"When the Maine Yankee nuclear plant was decommissioned, a community panel was formed. It was also voluntary but the company felt it would help avoid at least some of the bumps on the road," Lochbaum said by email. "It seemed to generally be a useful tool. If nothing else, it served as a great communications tool allowing the company to explain its plans and the community to express its concerns. While this did not preclude all disagreements, at least the parties were debating real issues instead of misconceptions."

San Onofre's panel will hold public meetings at least quarterly, SCE said. It hopes to submit a decommissioning plan to the NRC later this year. The NRC will have a representative at the meeting, officials said.

A bolt of lightning streaked from the sky and hit close to the LaSalle County nuclear power plant in Illinois, knocking its two reactors off the main power grid last April.

The reactors went into automatic shutdown. Five emergency generators sprang into action. But things went awry as workers tried to get “makeup water” into the reactor vessels to cool them, and use safety relief valves to control mounting internal pressure: Within hours, pressure had risen so high that venting automatically stopped. Workers declared some emergency systems inoperable.

Power was restored about five hours later, but the temperatures of some components continued to rise until they were literally off the charts – too high to be recorded. It took a series of maneuvers over the next several days to repair degraded parts before the reactors could be restarted.

It wasn’t the systems that screwed up. It was the people.

America’s nuclear watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, dispatched a special team to investigate this “near miss.” The NRC concluded that licensed control room operators lacked an adequate understanding of how heat-removal pumps and relief valves worked – but despite this disturbing finding, the NRC “did not find any violations associated with this cluelessness,” says an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Quoting tennis champion John McEnroe, ‘You cannot be serious!’” the UCS analysis continues. “These pumps and valves are among the most important emergency equipment at the plant. Federal regulations require owners to have adequate procedures backed by effective training to guide control room operators. ... The NRC documented clear violations of these regulatory requirements ... but failed to cite them – in spite of the fact that the NRC has issued violations for very similar failings in the past.”

The NRC is not an incompetent regulator, the analysis says – but it exhibits a split personality, a la Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s a characterization the NRC vehemently rejects.

Three years after the tragedy at Fukushima, the regulation of nuclear power is getting critical re-evaluation not only in the United States, but the world over. The UCS’ analysis comes on the heels of a U.S. Government Accountability Office probe into post-Fukushima nuclear regulation worldwide, as well as the NRC’s own annual assessments of America’s nuclear plants.

Not everyone is pleased with the pace of change.

“Today marks three years since the Fukushima disaster, and I am still concerned that the NRC is taking so long to require the implementation of the safety plan that its own staff recommended,” said U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in a statement earlier this month.

‘NEAR-MISS’

Last year, the NRC investigated 10 near-misses – a term that the NRC hates, but that the UCS insists on using because the incidents “raised the risk of damage to the reactor core – and thus to the safety of workers and the public.”

In addition to the aforementioned operator errors that the NRC let slide in Illinois, there was a crane that collapsed in an Arkansas plant, falling through the floor, killing a worker and disabling electrical equipment. There were the cracks in tubes in a reactor vessel head in North Carolina that were supposed to have been fixed years before, but were not. And security problems at Washington state’s Columbia Generating Station and Alabama’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant – though the NRC won’t release details of these problems, or their causes, or their fixes. It’s a security issue, the NRC says.

San Onofre’s reactors are no longer operating, so it could not appear on this list. But it has racked up two near-misses since the UCS began its annual examinations in 2010 – both in 2012, when the mysterious tube wear in its new steam generators led to the release of radioactive gas, culminating in its complete shutdown last year.

California’s only other operating nuclear power plant – Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo – had a near-miss in 2010, after the NRC discovered it had been operating for 18 months with disabled emergency cooling systems for the reactor core and containment vessel. While no single incident landed Diablo on the near-miss list last year, its continued operation is evidence of the NRC’s Jekyll-Hyde dichotomy.

“In 2008, an earthquake fault line was discovered in the seabed close offshore from the two Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors,” the UCS analysis said. “An earthquake on this fault line could cause ground motions greater than the plant was designed to withstand. The NRC inspector assigned full-time to Diablo Canyon concluded that (owner) Pacific Gas & Electric had not properly and thoroughly evaluated the new hazard, but his position was overruled by managers in NRC’s Region IV offices who allowed both reactors at the plant to continue operating.”

When similar earthquake protection deficiencies were identified at the Beaver Valley, Humboldt Bay, Maine Yankee, San Onofre, Surry and West Valley nuclear facilities, the NRC’s Dr. Jekyll ordered them shut down until their owners had provided adequate protections, UCS said. “Yet today, the NRC’s Mr. Hyde allows Diablo Canyon to operate despite the known risks. ... Absent random decision-making processes like flipping a coin or tossing a dart at a ‘yes/no’ chart, such disparate treatment cannot be explained.”

Overall, though, the trend seems to be going in the right direction. Between 2010 and 2013 70 near-misses were reported at 48 reactors, the UCS said. There were 29 in 2010 and again in 2011; down to 18 in 2012; and down even further to 14 in 2013. There was also a “marked reduction” in the significance of near-misses in 2013 compared with the earlier years.

“The decrease in number of reactors experiencing near-misses coupled with a lessening of the severity of such events is encouraging,” the analysis said. “On the other hand, the NRC conducted three special inspections at the Columbia Generating Station in 2013 – two for security matters and one for a safety problem. It is the first time in this series of reports that any reactor chalked up more than two special inspections in a single year.”

To be sure, the NRC is far more Jekyll than Hyde, the UCS said, as evidenced by the improving safety trends over the past three decades.

“But with so many American lives at stake, even a cameo appearance by the NRC’s Mr. Hyde is too much,” the UCS said. “If an earthquake near Diablo Canyon or a failure of the Jocassee Dam (upriver of South Carolina’s Oconee nuclear plant) harmed people, the NRC would be unable to look Americans in the eyes and honestly claim it had taken every reasonable measure to prevent the disaster. More Jekyll, less Hyde is this critic’s choice for the NRC’s future.”

TREATED ‘EQUALLY’

The NRC does not accept the Jekyll-Hyde comparison.

“Our Reactor Oversight Process, with its objective means of determining the significance of a given event, treats all plants equally,” said Scott Burnell, NRC spokesman, via email.

And it does not appreciate the aviation references implicit in the UCS’s criticism, either.

“The NRC does not use the term ‘near misses,’” Burnell said. “It appears UCS counts how many special inspections we do each year and then calls them ‘near misses.’ The agency sees special inspections as examples of the regulatory system working as designed.”

Indeed. The NRC issued annual performance assessments – i.e., report cards – to the nation’s 100 operating commercial nuclear power plants this month, and 89 of them landed in the two highest performance categories.

• Of those 89 highest-performing reactors, 80 fully met all safety and security performance objectives, an NRC summary said. Nine must resolve “one or two items of low safety significance.” They will get additional inspection and to follow up on corrective actions.

• Nine reactors clocked in with “a degraded level of performance,” the NRC said. They will get more inspections from the NRC, as well as “senior management attention and oversight focused on the cause of the degraded performance.” These plants were Browns Ferry 2 (Ala.); Duane Arnold (Iowa); Monticello (Minn.); Pilgrim (Mass.); Point Beach 1 (Wisc.); Sequoyah 1 and 2 (Tenn.); Susquehanna 2 (Pa.); and Watts Bar 1 (Tenn.).

• One reactor, Browns Ferry 1 in Alabama, is at the bottom of performance rankings.

• And one reactor, Fort Calhoun in Nebraska, is in a separate oversight program entirely, because of “an extended shutdown with significant performance issues,” the NRC said. It was cleared to restart in December, but will remain under special oversight and will not receive an annual assessment letter.

The NRC’s systems are robust, and getting better, said NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane on March 11– the third anniversary of the Fukushima disaster.

“When it comes to post-Fukushima actions, the NRC and industry can both be proud of the hard work we’ve done to date, to learn from this tragedy and take strategic actions to enhance safety,” she said in a speech that day. “The NRC staff’s work has focused on better positioning the reactor fleet to respond to future ‘unknown unknowns.’ We’ve learned and accomplished a great deal. There are some who may feel we’ve done too much, and some who’d argue we haven’t done enough. But, as the most safety-significant changes draw nearer to completion, we’re confident that the requirements we’ve imposed, and the actions industry has taken, supplement an already rigorous oversight program.”

There’s always, of course, room for improvement. We’ll be getting back to you with more on how nuclear regulation worldwide has changed in the wake of Fukushima, and what the NRC might do to make its work more effective.

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